


Visions

by ProjectSS



Category: Original Work
Genre: Crime Fighting, Curses, Detectives, Gen, Time Travel, Visions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 15:48:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30141882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProjectSS/pseuds/ProjectSS
Summary: Detective Alexander Kayn, somewhat of a legend among the police force, is known for his strange, supernatural ability. Gently pressing his fingers to a drop of blood, or an open wound, any injury of a person whether they may be alive or dead would show him the events that lead to the wound's existence. Case after case, Alexander has solved with ease using his power. No criminal could possibly escape him. It makes sense he was caught off guard when the tables turned on him, and suddenly he was the one being hunted.





	Visions

The room stunk beyond belief. The undrying blood’s scent remained pungent and rancid, burrowing into the nose of any policeman unfortunate enough to be assigned on to such a case. Yellow tape at the doorway flared the same warning as a stripe on a poisonous frog; “Don’t come near.” The chorus of footsteps was joined by a new pair of clumping boots as a cloaked figure ducked beneath the tape. Almost instantly, there were eyes on him, multiple officers turning to address the new arrival. He could feel their gazes on him, hungrily scanning over each and every detail as though he was a crime scene himself. His head was topped with flames, a matt of touselled red that wouldn’t straighten out no matter how many times he took a comb to it. Naturally, his eyes were green to match. Sea green, to be exact, the perfect way to extinguish the intensity of the inferno on his head. His features were chiselled, but only slightly, his complexion mostly dominated by a cinnamon dusting of freckles. He was equipped with a jaw-line more effective for cutting paper than diamonds or stone. He didn’t  _ look _ particularly “cool” or “dangerous” by most standards, and yet every man and woman in the room viewed him in the same way a child would view their bad-ass older sibling with a motorcycle. Despite this, he still held his head high, crossing the crime scene on his long, elegant legs. Each movement seemed elegant, methodical beyond compare. Anticipation was clear as crystal on each face that saw him. Each face, except for one, who dismissed the newcomer as some stuck-up fool. Instead, the officer turned his attention back to his notepad. The newcomer saw the officer’s name tag, making a mental note of the name  _ “Officer Caleb Castairs”  _ and began his graceful stride across the room, almost gliding in a ghost-like fashion. More police officers had turned to address him with intrigue and excitement only rivaled by a group of golden retrievers. The wraith was by the body, now. He knelt carefully at the edge of the crimson lake surrounding the lifeless corpse. His hardened gaze met with the lifeless stare of a man who’s life had been taken from him. Much to his dismay, the victim’s eyes were still wide open in distress; It almost seemed like the face hadn’t changed since the moment he’d died, a mask of betrayal sewn onto his skin. As his breath caught in his throat, he slowly reached towards the dead, his audience watching his every move. Gazing into the eyes of the deceased always made this harder.

Castairs noticed the quiet, turning to see this odd newcomer touching evidence without gloves. The only line of thought his mind managed was  _ ‘What is he thinking?!’  _ before he picked his way between the police officers and reached out to the man who was about to possibly ruin a crime scene.  
“Hey, sir? You can’t do that, we need-” He was cut off when one of the officers pulled him back, harshly. When Castairs turned to see, he recognised the bristled chin of a close friend on the force, and one who had been  _ on _ the force for far longer.  
“Let him do his thing…” Peter Stewart whispered irritatedly in Caleb’s ear. The newer officer shook his head, confused. Just when he was about to ask more questions, Peter continued speaking. “Ah, I forget how new you are sometimes.” He started, eyeing the figure as his fingers inched closer to the blood that was still leaking from the wounds. “He’s somewhat of a legend on the force, Detective Alexander Kayn. I’d tell you more, but that’d ruin the surprise, wouldn’t it?” Peter relaxed his grip on Caleb, who only scowled in response.  
“No surprises,” he demanded impatiently, standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow officer. “you know how much I hate them.” Peter exchanged some questioning glances with other officers around the room, most of which simply responded with a nod that said “Tell him.” and nothing more.  
“I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but it’s something supernatural. The guy can just…  _ touch _ a wound, or a drop of blood, and he instantly gains insight into what might have caused it. It’s weird.” Peter’s explanation was a wonky one, especially in the eyes of a hard-core science believer such as Caleb, who’s instant response was to laugh in his companion’s face.

Peter’s explanation was an understatement, to say the least, for it wasn’t mere insight that Alexander was granted; It was a full-on vision of the scene. He’d been capable of it since he was very young, as early as he could remember. It started with his own injuries. After scraping his knee on the playground like the reckless child he was, he often poked at the torn skin with curiosity. While receiving the injury itself had etched the moment into his memory, even gently touching his fingers to the raw flesh was like he was going over the line-art in a bold marker, making the emotions and pain jump out at him once more. He thought this was normal. He thought that anyone had this reaction when touching the places they’d been hurt. But it wasn’t so simple. One of his closest school friends, a boy his age, had always had these marks on his back. Weird-looking flesh that seemed like it had been torn apart and hastily fixed.  
“Stretch marks.” Jack had said to Alex in the changing rooms. “Mum says I’m a growing boy!” He grinned at his close friend, although his eyes told a different story, his gaze distant and bitter. Alexander didn’t pick up on it. For someone who’d go on to become a detective, he wasn’t the most observant child. However, when Jack stole his underwear and Alex had been forced to chase him around the changing room, he punished his friend with a slap on the back when he finally caught him. The slap did more to hurt Alex than it did to Jack. So many memories he shouldn’t have, moments he shouldn’t know about. Terrible things, something a child should never be exposed to. In that moment, Alex saw through Jack’s eyes as whips descended upon him, lashing at his back, tearing ravenously at his skin. Alexander had his own scars brought upon him that day.

It wasn’t an easy power to escape, either. There would come a time when Alexander was a young adult, looking to make his debut in the dating scene. The restaurant had a wonderful, relaxing aura to it, the smell of high-quality cuisine wafting over to him. Combine that with the  _ very _ beautiful woman in front of him, and he was in bliss. He noticed something about the woman’s eyes, heterochromatic. The sky was trapped in one, the ocean in the other, as though the horizon had been trapped in her mind. When he asked her about it, she explained it wasn’t natural. One of them was a prosthetic eye from a broom accident she had as a child. That night, after he walked her up to her doorstep and cupped her cheek as the glorious moonlight bounced off of it, his thumb brushed a  _ little _ too close to her fake eye, showing him a replay of something far more sinister than she had initially let on. This woman had a past mingled with a lot of the wrong people, it’d seem. Alexander staggered back, the torturing Visions still dancing in the forefront of his mind, taunting him. After his date helped him to his feet, the two decided to call it a night. He cursed the power multiple times. He was never religious, but occasionally he tried praying for it to go away. It wouldn’t. It never ceased, so many accidental contacts with wounds would lead to horrific images flashing across his mind. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, like a self-inflicted injury that happened by mistake. But as he and his friends grew older, he realised how many of them had shady or disturbing backgrounds that he knew about. It was a curse, through and through, to be subjected to such traumatic Visions. So what was Alexander’s solution? Make a profit off of it.

Alexander Kayn had been a detective for years at this point. It was a lot easier to stomach the pain of the Visions when he was doing it for justice. He’d even earned some degree of mastery over it; He’d learned how to detach his Visions from the victim’s point of view, able to observe the scene from afar, simply gazing into the past as a bystander instead of reliving someone else’s painful fate. He preferred it that way. All that was left was to reign it in a bit more. The Visions still came the  _ moment _ he touched an injury, be it a recently open wound rearing its ugly head or a long-faded scar withstanding the test of time. Kayn hoped against hope he’d master the Visions some day. But today wasn’t that day, today was a case day.  
“I’m so sorry…” He muttered under his breath. Even if the person was no longer alive, the apology still felt necessary to him. A thin finger reached out and pressed gently to one of the wounds. Stone cold. Naturally, Kayn shuddered. It didn’t matter how many times he’d done it, the jump into the deep end of the pool was always unpleasant. The world around him darkened, the murmurs of the officers surrounding him vanishing from his ears, the officers  _ themselves _ vanishing from sight. In the vision, a gentle humming sounded from the kitchen, the hum of someone alive and well. Kayn craned his neck upward to see the victim, colour in his cheeks and a spring in his step, dancing around the kitchen without so much as a single fuck given about anything at all. Alexander stood up straight, the motion smooth as a mirror. Thanks to muscle memory, he’d subconsciously reached into his pocket to retrieve a pen and pad, writing down the details of the scene around him; How the windows were locked; How the door was shut; There were no vents in the room; It all seemed like a perfectly secure place for a joyful man to be preparing his dinner after a long day at work. So what  _ happened? _

A knock sounded at the door, the banging of knuckles against the wooden surface Alexander’s eyes went to the victim, who seemed rather surprised by the appearance of someone at the door. The unexpected visitor, Alex hadn’t seen one of these in a while. The victim jauntily approached the door, not letting the change to his plans for tonight ruin his mood. Behind the door was a snarling man, a real behemoth with his hands neatly folded behind his back. It was entirely obvious he was dangerous, Alex could read his face as clearly as a book, the words “Intent to harm” were scattered wildly across his pages. The attacker shut the door behind him, inviting himself into the room, chasing after the victim before he even had a chance to defend himself. The knife he’d been hiding behind his back would have glistened if these Visions showed him any form of reflection. Though the blade was dull to him, it proved its sharpness as the blade bit into the flesh, staining itself with red. The horrible liquid pooled around the hilt of the blade, dropping onto the floor, and the victim dropped to his knees in a mixture of horror and shock. Alexander watched distastefully as the attacker wiped his knife clean on his bare hand, preparing to make a sketch of his face in his notepad. He started with the eyes, he  _ always _ started with the eyes. They were narrowed to slits in his blood-lust. Similarly to the knife, they were devoid of any glint of glisten through the filter the Vision showed Alexander the scene, making them seem even more lifeless and horrid. The eyes were all Alex managed to sketch before something happened. Something Alexander had never experienced before. As his pencil danced across the page, sketching the monster’s eyes with accuracy rivalling an olympic archer, he was stopped, a hand on the note pad. The attacker’s hand. Without wavering, Alex looked straight into the lifeless eyes of a cold-blooded killer, lifeless in a different way to the eyes of the corpse in the master reality. Lifeless in a way that was more threatening that haunting. The hardened detective stood his ground, an unbreakable bulwark protecting his own emotions. The attacker’s voice came out as a hiss:  
“You’re next, Detective Alexander Kayn.” He scowled, a voice as smooth and rich as a chocolate river. His hand, now empty of the knife but still bloodied from creating the wound, cupped Alex’s cheek. “Don’t bother watching your back, I’ll get you either way. Your resistance will simply be a waste of both our time.” His next two moves were so quick, so  _ jarring _ , that the thought-to-be-unbeatable detective didn’t even have time to process. First was a gentle kiss on the cheek, the murderer’s hand coming away from Kayn and leaving a bloody handprint, followed by a hefty strike that spun him around with the force, knocking him clean out of the Vision. All the officers were gazing at him once more, devastated to find the legendary Detective Alexander Kayn had supposedly been defeated in whatever game it was he played with his targets. He coughed violently, reaching to touch his cheek where the vile creature had held him. There was no longer a bloody handprint there, the nectar of life having been left in the past, evidence of the moment lost in time. Alex wanted to vomit. The urge to retch surged through his veins, rampant and unyielding. Even his eyes had begun to water. He’d been found by something twisted, and a deep feeling in his gut told him it wouldn’t let him go.  
_ ‘Things just became difficult,’  _ He thought, the voice in his mind hissing with a mixture of irritation and despair.  _ ‘Just when I was starting to not mind the Visions…’ _


End file.
